I had picked up on a life as a nun who drowned coming back across in a boat from Mont St Michel in France to the mainland.

It was a very detailed life and I knew the buildings very well, but not in this life. When my husband and I travelled to France he wanted to check it out. I was reluctant as thought it unreal. I described to him as we walked along the causeway towards the Mont that used to leave by a secret doorway in the side of the building, down a steep path. I left in secret as I was illustrating bibles there and women were not supposed to be in the monastery as it was then.

I could not spot this door nor the pathway and got quite upset and gave up. But my husband being over a foot taller than me kept looking and spotted both the pathway and the door outlined in the brickwork. He had to shove me up the bank in order to see it and I got really upset thinking I could not have made it up, I could not even see it in this life!

I had told him where my body had washed up on the shore and he asked a local fisherman near the waters edge where flotsam washed up and he pointed to the exact area I had written down 10 years before. I did not even try to find the nunnery in the local village from where I had come from, I had enough and left feeling vindicated but upset.

As I walked along the causeway and boy was arguing in english with his dad “its not a castle its a monastery” said the father “but it was when I was here, I was a soldier” the boy said really angry and upset. That triggered the other memory of St Michel, of my coming back and staying there in a hospital on way home from the Crusades, and rather overwhelmed by now, I stopped and called to the boy “it was a castle, and I too was there as a soldier!” he laughed and looked so relieved and his father astonished.

I shouted after them “never let them tell you that you are wrong, that you dont know, you do, always” and I was in tears by then and I am now as I write this.

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The Beginning the Conversation

This account gives me goosebumps. It is the sort of narrative that the late Ian Stevenson, psychiatrist and parapsychologist, and the grandfather of reincarnation studies, would probably have relished following up on. Although he tended to focus on past life recall amongst Asian populations, including India and Sri Lanka, and in particular accounts given by children there is probably enough in this testimony to warrant investigation.

Some of us have had personal glimpses into other times but these insights are usually fleeting – enough to make us stop and reflect – but too light on detail to follow up on.

Elsewhere on the Net

Continue this Conversation on the Evidence of Reincarnation below

Do you believe in past lives? Do you have your own reincarnation story to share?

Well Rosemary, this is indeed a “goose bump” story. I do however have to go back to my previous discussions regarding our having a “Continuum”, rather than “Past Life/Reincarnation”, theory. But of course, that is merely my point of view.

As to which has more validity, I’m not sure it really matters. The facts is that many of us have these absolute “I KNOW I was there” memories.

I believe I have already shared my memories of the late 1700’s/early 1800’s, at the Battle of Cathars and even one back to prehistory. To say these are visceral is one thing, knowing they are part of my Continuum is another. They are indeed that “real”.

I do have to comment also on John Edward. I too was a firm believer in his showmanship more-so than “ability” until events in my life showed me the truth. Yes, he lives comfortably, but why not, he earns his rewards. As for there being any hint of charlatan behavior, I urge our readers to be very careful in their words.

In my opinion he is one of the handful of the absolute genuine articles.

The things that are said about him in the media are bent on showing the sensationalism that media is all about, not the TRUTH. John Edward (McGee) will always remain a legitimate and respected medium in my book, though I know he has a distaste for that particular label.

I dont recall you sharing your memories of other lives here on this forum. That doesn’t mean that you haven’t but something as prominent as Clan of the Cave Bear living would stick in my mind (I hope!). So, out of interest I’d be keen to learn more. I’d also be interested to know if and how any/all/some of these memories have drawn you to theology and paganism in this life. You are indeed an interesting specimen 🙂

Re John Edward, are your statements based on intuition or knowing, direct experience or heresay. Its is a coincidence, or not, that I have just referred a member of the community to him – for no other reason than it felt right to do so. And, it remains to be seen what that right actually means, of course.

As you know I did try late last year to begin offering paranormal services through this website but just couldn’t get the momentum going from within the community base here. That has left me wondering why.

Anyway, Felbain I look forward to reading more about you and that Bear …

No, fair enough, Rosemary. I have only seen him a few times and that was my impression as an explanatory device for his frequent mistakes and his method of drawing responses from the audience. Absolute sceptics would, of course say he plants everyone in the audience, guesses at names starting with ‘J’, just does pure cold readings, the Amazing Randi can explain all this away in purely physical terms, etc etc, but I have a feeling he has a basic ability, just not the one he claims to have. (I do have a critical reasoning lens but am also an open-minded scientist concerning psi ability because I have seen manifestations of it with my own eyes, the first and most basic criterion of genuine scientific enquiry.)

We know different people have different types of psi ability in strength, sometimes being able to do just one thing or another thing, and that was how John Edwards struck me — someone who has very superficial things to say from the ‘deceased relatives’ once he ‘breaks through’, but he is good at guessing relatives’ names — even sometimes the living relatives of the cameraman! He would also possibly be able to intuit a few things from the minds of the willing participants around certain events or objects concerning that relative — if that is his specific ability — to convince them that he is indeed communicating with the dead when he is in fact just extracting a few thoughts from the minds of the living at a close range. This, indeed, may be how many fairground psychics do their thing to convince their clients they know something about the person’s life and can see into the cosmos etc! Draw out a couple of factoids from the person in front of you and make up the rest.

Of course, it is very easy to observe John Edwards ‘first hand’ because he is making massive profits out of whole seasons of TV series being shown around the world plus his extensive money-making touring activities and making a cult or franchise of his name. He is absolutely thrusting himself out there for large profits and making various claims which should be testable.

Money is featuring more and more? Not sure why that should seem so. I thought I was covering a pretty big range of topics, from Buddhism to Christianity to the Source to EMF equipment to measuring abilities. Money may have gotten a mention once. Someone is having a Freudian slip somewhere no doubt.

I do have a concern about P.T. Barnum types who may promote themselves dishonestly for a living, and in particular syndicated TV series are pretty lucrative. I thought that was the nature of your ‘Psychic Scams’ work?

The sceptic sites tend to lean *very* heavily on their belief that *all* psychics are inherently all fake and therefore all their revenue is obtained from false pretences and that some make quite a lot. I don’t mind people making money off their TV series as long as they are legit — false pretences aren’t so crash hot. Also, quite a few people got into Chip Coffey over the ‘Psychic Kids’ series essentially saying he was creating problems for the kids, so I’ll let readers be the judge of that one if they ever get a chance to view/review the series.

I agree with you re the sideshow tv shows and live events Sean. If is is for entertainment – so be it – but when these shows play with people’s emotions they become amoral.

It is a difficult world in which to practice and I do feel for the bona fide consultants ho have been dealt the gift and feel they have a duty to use it often without charge. The paranormal industry is a murky world. What I dont understand fully though is why people continue to hand over their lives, their thinking and heaven knows what else to institutionalised religions. I can understand how the churches rose to prominence in the olden days but quite why they hold such power today escapes me. I understand that some people come to rely on religion and indeed, their faith its what keeps them in this world. Do the churches offer more than solace and promises? Why are people willing to fork out for this and not legitimate psychic consultations? Is this more about branding, market share, and power than promises fulfilled?

My thoughts on ‘reincarnation’ have been very similar to Alan’s also — not that souls are ‘recycled’ from some cosmic pool etc but that wandering spirits impress their memories on other people who are alive today.

Perhaps such people are particularly susceptible? So, there’s at least two alternative hypotheses possible on the matter.

How do you test them? Although it’s almost as bizarre to think that a spirit can just inject memories into your head as it is to think that souls are recycled…

Sean
There’s also spirit of place, where souls remain attached to specific locations. And of course, there’s the time warp element to this where witnesses are transported to another era and bear witness to history in action – enter horse drawn coach stage left 🙂

hmm, are they really transported to another era, or is the era transported to them in the form of a spirit conferring memories onto the person? Also dovetails with the theory of spirits needing to draw on the energy of nearby living persons somewhat…

I like the idea that time doesn’t exist – it’s just God’s way of making sure that everything doesn’t appear to happen at once 🙂

But, how this works as far as souls and reincarnation goes Im not sure. If all things are happening simultaneously, is a part (big and small) of the spirit left in each time dimension? I don’t know. But I love playing with the idea.

That presupposes a God in the Muslim-Judeo-Christian sense (hard evidence?) who of necessity gets bigger and bigger and more and more powerful the more that we discover through science — remember the universe was only very little 3,000 years ago before telescopes were invented, and the sky was a canopy with some stars stuck on. We didn’t understand DNA and therefore an immaculate conception was easily possible!

Lacking good evidence, what if first we hypothesise there’s no God as s/he has been constructed in religion (avoiding being burnt at the stake by dogmatists in the process), then conceive of what time might be in physics, how information might travel backwards in time when we are only aware of it going forward, etc.

Thanks for pulling me up on this Sean. I should have put God in parentheses. I do think, ultimately, there is a force within which the randomness of the universe works but as to its form, I don’t know….no idea.

Im unsure what you are alluding to in your second last para and so, will wait to hear more on this.

well, if we hypothesise or believe that maybe God as traditionally thought of is just a man-made construction in an attempt to create a cosmology and explain things — one theory is that monotheistic religions emerged from pastoral societies such as in the middle east (where sheep and goats came from) with one shepherd and many sheep, or the need for a super-powerful magical ‘alpha male’ figure to make everything better, etc — then a lot of the pronouncements here around the purpose of everything become questionable… And look at the history of religious wars!

Just done my fair share of the humanities and sciences, and an enquiring mind.

Phillip Adams – Australian journalist – (fairly avowedly atheist) said something interesting some time back, paraphrasing — “given all the problems in the world, if there is a God, he is a little god” — and this was actually a profound and instant ‘a-ha’ moment for me, an epiphany, in terms of making sense of why a bunch of people believe there is a very powerful spirit watching over them that has some sort of infinite abilities (but apparently never exercises them), based upon a bunch of tenuous stories from a small region in the near east. (This is besides studying comparative religion through anthropology, and reading up on Buddhism in particular. And thinking about the psychology of religiosity, people’s need for a crutch through the ages and in sometimes extremely difficult times.)

But the “little god” got me to thinking that perhaps a spirit of limited power contacted these people and worked through the prophets. Maybe. Interestingly, on one of the recent American psychic TV shows, the one with the gay psychic, there was supposed to be a ‘demon’ living in the garage of a home with children etc who was keeping a number of spirits there in fear and lying to them. (Other readers may remember this episode. It would be well worth getting in touch with some of these psychic presenters from the US to find out more about what’s really going on out there, they’re often on Facebook etc.)

These spirits manifested in the house a lot quite visibly. Again, I started wondering if there can be such a thing as a ‘demon’ meaning a kind of different sort of spirit or species, i.e. not a passed on human soul — where would such a being come from, and what is in it for them to behave like this? Or are they just malevolent people who have passed on?

Is this possible on our planet if you rule out the existence of either a big or small god, angels and demons as other species, and assume only human souls have passed on into another kind of existence?

PS I think it was Chip Coffey on Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal. He seems like a nice man.

He’s certainly cashing in on his website, but he’s got to make a living.

There was another show I saw on TV (very random incidental stuff because I don’t watch much TV or get cable) where there was a female investigator without ability who carried a standard EMF reader to detect ghosts working with a genuine psychic who could communicate directly with ghosts. Wonder if it’s possible to use EVP monitors so anyone can do it? My friend could see and communicate with ghosts even via webcam and audio — when I couldn’t see anything! Maybe it’s possible for ordinary folk to amp up their senses with some add-ons to achieve the same outcome as genuine psychics? Something like the psychic equivalent of night vision goggles.

There seems to be lots of fun physics gear out there — EMF and temperature readers, gaussmeters, EVP monitors, etc. Here’s a bunch at http://www.lessemf.com/ghost.html , don’t know what’s available directly in Oz…

Sean, your throw away line ‘he’s got to make a living’ is actually a big issue for those involved in the paranormal industry. The world has accepted that almost everything, including religion needs to be funded but when it comes to paranormal consultants, many practitioners believe that the services should either be given freely and the universe will provide in other ways and in the case of their clients, some don’t see why they should pay.

But that wasn’t the main thread of your post….

You say your friend can communicate with ghosts. This, again is an interesting aside. How do you know he/she can? Does it boil down to your friendship and trust in each other or is there more to it?

How do we assess when anyone, psychic or not, is telling the truth? And, of course, this question leads into what is truth and is it subjective anyway? Maybe your friend, and every other Medium sees a truth, their truth and when it aligns with their client it is sees as the truth? If you get what I mean Sean?

Re EVP, it is a relatively new field but given we are now in the technological age it is not surprising that such equipment is being used for such purposes. I haven’t been involved in any of this kind of work directly but certainly more individuals are pursuing it. Im not even sure who, if anyone, is researching this academically (any research students looking for a thesis topic) but I remember a guy who works with one of the tv channels in Australia contacted me during the first survey round to talk about his involvement with it. You can imagine how much equipment, and the sophistication of it, that he has at his disposal?

There are loads of downloads of evp recordings on the net but often they involve speed changes and technical tweaking to make any sense of what is being said. That, of course calls into question the validity of the data.

Like anything to do with the paranormal, evp is well worth investigating I reckon – with an enquiring and cautious mind.

Just as a post script, googling Chip Coffey brings up a range of opinions, where he is targeted by the sceptic community in particular. Further reading show Chip’s views are quite Christian orthodox, hence he draws on ‘demons’ etc a lot in his shows which I would question — wonder whether he’s just playing to the prejudices and beliefs of the highly Christianised US, especially given his apparent flair for showmanship and making money out of his ‘gift’. This is a different matter to whether he has actual abilities in any particular psychic direction.

Similarly, I believe on observation that John Edwards has an ability to read the minds of his living audiences, but limited or no ability to communicate with deceased persons, and just draws on engrams in the audience to get feeds of information, and it’s ‘warm reading’ after that — he just gets snippets of information like names that he can start on, then pretends to communicate with the deceased person who says they’re alright or something. I could be wrong, we would have to study him more closely or have him come clean one day to know. I kind of twigged watching him once when he got a psychic feed accidentally from his cameraman about a *living* relative. So I believe he has a particular psychic talent but is also acting partly fraudulently and dishonestly and playing unfairly and unethically on the hopes of his audiences of contacting their deceased loved ones. I could be misjudging him, but that’s how it appears.

Re my friend, I believe in her abilities because 1) she also had the ability to call up spirits in the area which I did observe, and 2) she lives overseas and obtained information on dates and the neighbourhood from the ghost she could not have possibly known or researched — the nature of the buildings of 1850 were later corroborated in a slim and obscure history book of the area held only in the local university library which she could not have possibly been able to gain access to beforehand as she wasn’t even in the country (and the local buildings have subsequently been demolished twice over and are a completely different mish-mash today, so no cues there). Also the nature of the guy’s job, his origins, his fate, and so on rang true, and she had no prior knowledge of the nature of colonial settlement or Australian timelines of settlement either — nor any real interest. Some people are good liars, but nobody’s that good — she would ask questions on my behalf and fire back his answers at once which corroborated with local history. Some people just have a true, perfectly formed sixth sense to both see and hear ghosts as if they are still alive. All this is in my earlier comments and in the survey I filled out, btw.

I wont be commenting on John Edwards or any other practitioner that I havent at least observed first hand.

There is always the notion of universal knowledge Sean and thus, any consultant or individual may, in fact, be downloading information from the ‘ether’, for want of a better word.

Could it be that those who are able to access this universal knowledge filter it through their belief systems? Thus, unbeknown to them, they attribute their information to angles, religious figures, dead people, spirit guides etc rather than the knowledge just ‘being’ available, on call, always there?

I have no doubt that certain people at certain times are open to this repository and there is a bleeding of information from another realm to this world.

Upfront I must say Im not a fan of Phillip Adams. He has had his moments when he has inspired me but I went off his writings some time ago and havent been back to them since.

Anyway, with that said, ‘given all the problems in the world, if there is a God, he is a little god’. I can see his angle but I don;t agree with it. If we are here to grow and learn then we can only do that by experiencing life in all its glory and ugliness. I prefer to think that there is a Source and he has the insight and wisdom to let us falter and fall and learn and grow, and pick us up when we ask and need.

I’m a bit more pragmatic about sources and about our existences as just a product of processes of evolution, I guess. Lots of thinking in this area as well — we like to privilege ourselves as special beings, but we share 98% of the DNA of the chimpanzee, and we tend not to regard them as anything particularly special. A lot of our behaviours are still ‘instinctoid remnants’ as Maslow put it, but reading ‘Demonic Males’ comparing human behaviour with other primates is quite illuminating. So not sure what the hypothesised ‘Source’ has in mind for us — sounds a little like the fallacy of anthropomorphism to me. Looking at various over-populated and under-regulated parts of the world where 2/3 of the world goes to bed hungry, we are very spoilt and self-indulgent in the 1st world looking for meaning and individual self-actualisation all the time…

I can think of worse ways of being ‘self indulgent’ Sean. How about considering that contemplation, thought, reflection, insight – even prayer and meditation perhaps – all have an impact on the world – for better of for worse.

That’s nice, Rosemary, but I actually work with a political party and things in this world are often getting worse, not better, driven mainly by money and greed over resources.

You have to meditate and contemplate in a broader context to understand the real world of real machinations and motivations.

Examples include coal seam gas mining globally, the interest the western world has had in middle eastern hydrocarbon resources for the past century, the invasion of other countries for gain under pretexts, the ever-burgeoning war machine, the GFC, and so on.

Housing affordability and the housing/credit bubble are in terrible shape worldwide leading to the GFC and massive unemployment particularly in the US and PIIIGS countries.

Housing is over-priced in Australia due to the actions of speculators and banks. We are running down the non-renewable finite resources of this planet daily partly through greed and partly through runaway population growth.

This is the material world we’re stuck in, a few post-physical ethereal ghosts can’t sort out the mess for us. The capitalist ‘greed is good’ model seems to be failing us, and yet it is our main driver.

I have always been mystified with reincarnation. It crosses my mind with the possibility of spirit giving the individual the information so they can follow the path of the spirits own living memories. As the information is so exact it could allow belief of the individual chosen, to think it is reincarnation.(Were you guided?)
This is in no way a denial of reincarnation, it is my thought of another explanation for the wonderful phenomenon around us.
Alan.